Mr. Speaker, it is clear we are not.
The fundamental thing for people to understand, and many of our ridings in British Columbia can show this descriptively, is that there can be a first nations child attending a school on reserve and another first nations child attending a school not on reserve, and there is a 30% to 40% funding difference between the experience of those two children because Ottawa controls the purse strings on the funding going to the kid who happens to be going to a school on reserve. In some places, that is an across-the-street situation. However, in rural and remote first nation communities, there is no across the street; there is only the first nation's school.
We say, and the Human Rights Tribunal has said, that these are racist and discriminatory policies, end of sentence. If this was against African Canadians, Jewish Canadians, or any other identified group of Canadians, we would all be up in arms asking how this could be possible. However, it is first nations kids, and that is the way it has been for 150 years of Liberal and Conservative governments. The Liberal government is looking to blame somebody, and saying that it is somehow different. If the government wants to make it different, then it should be different. If it wants to be different, then it should not back-load the funding in such a cynical way, which has been done so many times, because first nations have become wise to the oldest trick in the book.